Peak solar production is in the summer.
Peak electricity demand is driven by AC, primarily when it’s hot... in the summer.
Peak electricity demand is driven by AC, primarily when it’s hot... in the summer.
As solar keeps getting cheaper the question shifts further from how do I get maximum power to how do I maximize my investment. Which is a slightly different and far more complex optimization problem.
Residential installations are usually setup to maximise the total output, and often the positioning is constrained by the geometry of the roof. Residential solar installers are really in a race to the bottom.
One up and coming trend which might have a significant impact on this is for residential retail tariffs to be directly linked, at 30min resolution, to the wholesale energy market prices.
From what happened in Texas recently that sounds like a nightmare for consumers. https://www.npr.org/2021/03/06/974417969/texas-wont-reduce-1...
They avoid the Texas problem by limiting the maximum rate to be no more than the government regulated "default power offer" over the entire year.
Planning on getting both solar power and a battery system in the next 12 months, changing my electric hot water to a heat pump and moving to hydronic heating and split system airconditioning.
I'm also going to install a second circuit back to my smart meter that will connect to my apartment garage space so that an EV charger can be installed in the future.
In our case I definitely recall most of those outages happening midday as it screwed up lunch. There were other factors as well (I think transmission efficiency diminishes as you approach capacity, so localized issues are a thing)
I don't know about you, but the indoor temperature above which I start wanting AC is around 72-75F, or ~23C. Lots of the PNW gets over that for much of the summer. It didn't used to be this way, but I've wanted AC in Seattle for at least a few weeks a year, sometimes as much as 6 - 8 weeks, since 2013 or 2014. Particularly because the insulation in a lot of apartment buildings meant to make them more efficient in winter causes them to heat up like a furnace in a hot summer.
AC sure is a quality of life if not a necessity of life... Though if our homes were built for this climate rather than by Californian companies using shoddily adapted designs it might be another story.